The Secret of Lost Things

December 11, 2006
Hay's debut has all the elements of a literary thriller, but they
\t\t don't quite come together. Arriving in New York from Tasmania with $300, her
\t\t mother's ashes and a love of reading, 18-year-old Rosemary Savage finds work in
\t\t the Arcade Bookshop, a huge, labyrinthine place that features everything from
\t\t overstock to rare books. In its physicality, the store greatly resembles New
\t\t York's Strand (where Hay worked), and its requisite assortment of intriguing
\t\t bookish oddballs includes autocratic owner George Pike and his albino
\t\t assistant, Walter Geist. Rosemary is suspicious and worried when Walter enlists
\t\t Rosemary's help to respond to an anonymous request to sell a hand-written
\t\t version of Herman Melville's lost Isle of the
\t\t Cross (a novel that in fact existed but disappeared after Melville's
\t\t publisher rejected it). She confides in Oscar (the attractive, emotionally
\t\t unavailable nonfiction specialist), which only hastens the deal's momentum
\t\t toward disaster. Hay does a good job with innocent, intelligent Rosemary's
\t\t attempts to deal with sinister doings, and methodically imagines the evolution
\t\t and content of Melville's novel (which features a woman abandoned much like
\t\t Rosemary's mother). Hay also ably captures Rosemary's nostalgic memories of
\t\t Tasmania. The three narratives—intrigue, Melville, Tasmania—prove so
\t\t different, however, that recurring themes of loss and abandonment fail to tie
\t\t them together.